Yahoo! Answers is an example of a community-based, Internet-accessible question-and-answer submission system that allows users all over the world to submit questions that other users all over the world can view and answer. Users of question-and-answer submission systems submit such questions and answers using an Internet Browser such as Mozilla Firefox. After a user (an “asker”) has submitted a question, other users can read the question and, if they choose, submit an answer to the question. Question-and-answer submission systems typically allow users to see, along with a question, answers that have been submitted for that question, and the pseudonyms of the users (the “answerers”) who submitted those answers. As more and more questions are submitted to the question-and-answer system, more and more other users are able to view those questions, and more and more answers eventually may be submitted for those questions.
Existing question and answer systems are somewhat limited in their abilities to collect questions to which members of the community can submit answers. Typically, the only way that a question becomes entered into the system is by a community member's direct submission of the question to the system. Although many other people might be seeking for answers to various questions, many other people who are not members of the question-and-answer community might not even be aware of the existence of the question-and-answer system. Consequently, these other people are not benefited by the question-and-answer system. Furthermore, because the questions that these other people in many cases will not end up being submitted to the question-and-answer system, such questions are likely to go unanswered by members of the community even if some members of the community might actually know answers to those questions.
The problems discussed above are not limited to question-and-answer submission systems. The problems discussed above are applicable to many different kinds of online systems in which submitters are allowed to submit user-generated content that becomes accessible by other users of those online systems. Collectively, such online systems may be called “social knowledge systems.” For example, the problems discussed above also sometimes affect social knowledge system such as online bulletin board systems and online auction systems.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.